Where is East?

Some things to consider

In Matthew in the 1st verse of the second chapter,

"behold, there came wise men from the east"

The word "east" in Greek is:

Word: anatolh

Pronounce: an-at-ol-ay'

Strongs Number: G395

Orig: from 393; a rising of light, i.e. dawn (figuratively); by implication, the east (also in plural):--dayspring, east, rising. G393

Use: TDNT-1:352,57 Noun Feminine

Heb Strong: H3318 H4217 H5051 H6780 H6921 H6924

1) a rising (of the sun and stars)
2) the east (the direction of the sun's rising)

Comment:
So according to this, this Greek word for "east" is feminine...

So they came from the sunrise or from the goddess of the dawn.

Not from the direction of the east but from the east as it relates to the sky or the queen of heaven, Ishtar. Ishtar prior to being called Ishtar was called
"Inanna". Notice also the similarities between anatolh and Inanna..

In Genesis the English word for "east" is used also:

Genesis 3:24
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Comment:
This sounds very much like a landmark, pole or the center of the east.

A place where the procession of the zodiac would throughout the year move through and mark time.

Cain was banished to East of Eden or the land of Nod...

Nod in Hebrew means "to wander" or does it mean the land where the stars wander and are measured?

If there is a flaming sword placed there it sure does not seem like a movable wandering but more like a static place where celestial movement is observed by perhaps, "a tower" or zuggurat...

The Sumerian/Babylonian magi were known for their observing of the stars and their "wanderings".

The tree of life might perhaps be the fertility goddess herself and all of the branches of the pantheon.

Genesis 3:24
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.


https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/cherubim-1/
"In their function as guardians of Paradise the cherubim bear an analogy to the winged bulls and lions of Babylonia and Assyria,"


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna
"During the Akkadian Period, Ishtar was frequently depicted as a heavily armed warrior goddess with a lion as one of her attributes."

It's hilarious that RR/Cobbler alleges thatI am "on ignore," and that my posts get voted down just before he posts again. That modern historians refer to a place that they call Babylonia is not evidence that an anthropomorphized Babylon is responsible for the spread of religion to all corners of the earth.

Another ignored post by Setanta.

Where, exactly, is this stated in the article?

You can't know the post is by me unless you look at it. There's no point in putting someone on ignore if you keep peeking.

so comical and illogical

You can see who a post is by, without reading the post. Hover over the word 'ignored'.

I made an assumption that it is kind of hard to have a temple with priests when people are traveling around and hunting from meal to meal. They sort of live where they set up camp. In larger groups tasks (like shamanism) can be assigned to individuals along with other vocations related to skills.

This doesn't mean that rituals can't be performed by wandering hunter gatherers but rituals often require a community. For instance, ritualized dance is not very much fun when it is only between 8 or so people and who would play the drums and who would watch out for wild animals approaching the campsite? And oh boy, you get to dance with your sister... mating rituals are less fun with family members .

It just seems logical that a community does rituals better and this also facilitates trade and possibly even agriculture because they can settle down to one geographic area and build more permanent structures than lean tos and seasonal caves that are sometime prone to flooding whenever it rains.

Hunter gatherers did have rituals but not as sophisticated as when they began to develop communities with trade and had more people to assign duties to.

It is a logical assumption that communities do ritual better than an handful of solitary travelers. Even cave dwellers may have had a function in a larger community. Some travelers may have been hostile to other travelers and it was likely a to each their own affair.

Even animals when in larger communities are more likely to exhibit ritualized behavior.

I am sure that many hunter gatherers respectfully buried their dead but there was no whole town to mourn and throw a wake.

Communities are the very definition of being "civilized".

Just like when the western US was settled, many people left in a wagon and found a piece of land and squatted way out in the middle of nowhere.

Part two...

I would like to also mention...

Some may think of the American Indians (Native Americans) at the time of the European conquistadors as being hunter gatherers.

They were most certainly not.

Hunter gatherers lived tens of thousands of years earlier.

American Indians (Native Americans) were not "savages". At the very time Columbus came to the new world the indigenous people of America had cities, within the future US borders, that were larger than London.

Smallpox devastated their cities and ran ahead of the European invasion leaving large communities with only a few tribal survivors and their cities nearly emptied.

They were much farther advanced than simple stone tools, groans and grunts for a language and dragging their wife and siblings around by the hair.

Please explain, lol

West


ves·per
ˈvespər
noun
evening prayer.
"vesper service"
archaic
evening.

literary
Venus as the evening star.

noun: Vesper; plural noun: Vespers

Comment:
Interesting that the German word "vesper" has at its roots in the name Venus, another fertility goddess.

But I seem to be getting so much incredulous flack for suggesting that east is also named after a celestial goddess (of the east)...

A goddess that has come to signify the rise of polytheistic thought from a geographical area that is considered "the cradle of civilization" as it relates to the dawn of enlightenment.



It seems logical that the nouns, north and south, would also correlate to the names of deities.

I might also like to supply that many Germans actually pronounce the word east as isht or esht. They most often pronounce an s as sh.

Just like the word west,

One might say, "Well, the word west does not really sound like the word vespers."

But is does if one pronounces the word vespers as veshtbers and in Russian it would be pronounced weshtbers.

In Austria it is pronounced "Cal-ee-for-nia"

Venus is also one of the 7 planets that give their names to the days of the week. Knowledge of Venus was very important for navigation, creating calendars and knowing when to plant crops. It's the morning star.

Another bullshit alert: the population of London in 1400 was in excess of 50,000 and by 1500 was well over 60,000. The only city in the territory of what is now the United States was Cahokia, which, at its height, did not exceed 40,000. But Cahokia began to decline in the 13th century. By 1492, if any part of the former urban center was populated, it would have been little more than a village.

Remember, boys and girls, RR/The Cobbler just makes this **** up as he goes along.

It's funny that you mention animal communities just before saying that community is what makes humans civilized.

It is actually the other way around. Community is a fundamental aspect of biological life supporting other biological life. It exists at every level of every ecosystem.

What makes us civilized is the ability to strive for and achieve relative forms of independence in material self-sufficiency, thought/mind, emotional stability, etc.

Pandas are advanced civilized creatures, for example, because they voluntarily prefer veganism and live peacefully in isolation much of the time in nature. They basically avoid harming others, which is more so the definition of civilized.

That depends on whom you call "many" - I don't think that many Germans mumble.
"Ost" (east), btw, is short for the main direction "Osten" (east) used only in navigation and seafaring. It's pronounced sometimes with a long "o" ("Oost").

In German, "s" isn't pronounced as "sh" - we've got enough words with "sch" (we've got the double 's' ["ss" and "ß"] as well).

Any source I've been able to look at says it's from Latin like the English word vesper.

"Hesperus", however, the name of this mythical figure is derived from the Greek word for evening (hespera). The word has a common etymological root with Latin 'vesper' (the evening, the evening star) and west in the Germanic languages.

I understand your point in theory due to its compassionate nature but that would make fruit flies civilized also.

Community is the beginning of civilization and cooperative living but it is not the end all.

Communities often, through public forums, create laws that over time act as guidelines to social behavior.